Of Another Is My Touch, 2026
EXO, 2026
The Protectos, 2026
Thinking in Textiles, 2026
Exhibition
Of Another Is My Touch / My Puudutus on Teisest
Location: Kuressaare Raegalerii, Est
Gallery Direction by Helena Keskküla
Technical support by Veiko Kivi and Jaen Ots
Special thanks to Laura Elisabeth Konsand
Thanks to Mikelis Murnieks, Mayya Kuznetsova, Devin Handman, Miguel Lopez, Mel Mel Keane, Noémie Tshisumpa, Arto Vanhasselt, Lukas Wächtler, Paulina Koeleman, Gwion Lopez, Juan Bravo, Laura Konsad, Rino Sijen, Finn Wagner, Francesco Battaglia, Merit Karise, Saaremaa Museum
Supported by Estonian Cultural Endowment
Jeanne Vrastor
Curated by Tiiu Meiner
30.05.–27.06.26
Jeanne Vrastor’s exhibition explores how humans and materials shape each other. The same gestures used to weave, bend, fold, or shape materials thousands of years ago are still repeated today. Through this repetition, the exhibition understands that time is not a straight line of progress, but recurring cycles of making.
The first room is situated in a cave – a place where humans encounter stone, darkness, and geological time, shaping some of our earliest experiences of imagination, and meaning. There stands a sculptural figure made from SCOBY, a microbial leather formed by living organisms far older than us, whose coexistence within our bodies has shaped human evolution. The sculpture’s lower part is woven using ancient basketry techniques. By repeating these weaving gestures herself, Vrastor became interested in how the body can still relate to prehistoric humans through the same materials and movements.
This relationship continues through wool felted works depicting prehistoric tools and basketry remains sourced from archaeological archives. Often, these objects can only be encountered as photographs or behind glass. By working directly with fibres, wool, clay, and weaving techniques, Vrastor approaches them through touch, allowing the past to become tangible once again.
In basketry and tool-making, form emerges through the gestures of the hand. But what shaped what? Did humans shape materials, or did materials shape the hand — its grip, strength, and precision — through centuries of touch? A video of disembodied hands moves through this question. The hands could belong to anyone across time, with gestures connecting makers across generations.
If the first room contains the cave as a place of origin and return, the second follows these material relationships outward into the world. A figure with a microbial leather face stands with an aluminium spine and vertebrae made from bio-polymer. Rami fibre spills freely from the ceiling to the floor, while urtica nettle remains woven in suspended drops. Some fibres stay bound to older forms, while others loosen, spread, and search for new relations. From these fibres, aluminium-cast branches emerge, their forms taken from branches still used in basketry today. Swellings in the casts mark where a hand once gripped or bent them, fixing gesture and branch into one object.
Inside the woven nettle forms, small clay pieces made from local Saaremaa clay bear the marks of folding from the hand. Hanging like drops of rain, they place human gesture and natural formation within the same movement.
In Vrastor’s exhibition, the past is not behind us, standing still in the cave. It bends, folds, weaves, and loosens itself into new forms, remaining present within the body and our movements, which continue to shape the world, and us.